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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2016
Opinion
Adelle Chua, Editor mst.daydesk@gmail.com
EDITORIAL
POP GOES THE WORLD JENNY ORTUOSTE
VARGAS LLOSA IN MANILA: ON DICTATORS AND WRITING
“WHY do you think that all dictatorships have tried to control literature? They have established systems of censorship…” This interesting remark was made by Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa at a press conference at the Instituto Cervantes last Nov. 3. He has written over 30 works of fiction and nonfiction, and is also a columnist of the Madrid newspaper El Pais, which is circulated throughout Latin America. At the presscon at the Instituto Cervantes, the 80-year-old Peruvianborn novelist said about writing, “Dictators [and] dictatorships are right in being suspicious of this kind of activity, because I think this activity develops in societies a critical spirit about the world as it is…” Vargas Llosa speaks from experience, having observed the various oppressive regimes that were established at various periods in Latin America, and weathered the authoritarian regime of dictator Manuel Odría, who came to power in Peru in 1948, when Vargas Llosa was 12. A former presidential candidate in Peru, Vargas Llosa has been involved in politics most of his life. “It’s very difficult for a Latin American writer to avoid politics,” he said in October 2010, after learning that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize that year. “Literature is an expression of life, and you cannot eradicate politics from life.” The restrictive controls that Odria imposed on social life were among the factors that influenced Vargas Llosa to reject systems that arbitrarily restrict individual freedoms and leaders who abuse power and flout the law through the imposition of their will. He expressed this mindset as a recurring theme in his body of work, exploring despotism, military violence, and rebellion in some of his novels, among them The Time of the Hero (1963), Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), The War of the End of the World (1981), and the Feast of the Goat (2000). His decision to take this path in his writing garnered him the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010, which he received “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” He wrote those works fearlessly, knowing full well the risks that a writer takes for defying the status quo. As he told Time magazine in 1984: “If you are killed because you are a writer, that’s the maximum expression of respect, you know.” For those who are new to Vargas Llosa, which novel of his should be read first? At the presscon, UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies director Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo asked him which of his numerous novels he would recommend that she ask her students to read, by way of introducing him to
YOLANDA’S REVELATIONS I
t is almost three years since Super Typhoon “Yolanda” devastated the central Philippines and shook the nation to its core. On Nov. 8, 2013, what was said to be the strongest typhoon in recorded history made landfall several times across the country, from Eastern Samar to Palawan, and left on its trail untold loss and devastation. The rest of the world turned its attention to us. We never doubted we had allies in coping with the disaster. For that, we will always be grateful—and much as we aim to better help ourselves in the future, we do not share the President’s pronouncement that we do not need any aid from others. We do, we do. But more than the humbling realization that we cannot exist alone, Yolanda reminded us that there were many gaps that needed to be filled despite the existence of a law, the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act of 2010. A law merely lays down what it is we think we need to do. Implementing what the law prescribes is another thing—and it was here we failed miserably. There was a gap between what science told forecasters and what was communicated to the people. There was a failure to grasp that rushing to help the surivivors was not a matter of who got there first, and the most loudly. There was ignorance of the needs of those in the periphery, and of the challenges in bringing them help amid the bureacratic and logistical bottlenecks. There was the all-too-human issue of turf protection, and misplaced pride, and the apparently basic desire to bring down others in the attempt to boost one’s stock. We also saw how those who are expected to know
better simply gave in to petty politics while glossing over the more fundamental, more human demands of the situation. Finally, we discovered that we can be lazy enough to address lose ends when doing so would not serve our own purposes anymore. Case in point: The finding that despite the time that had passed, not all the rightful recipients of shelter assistance have received the help that has been promised them. It is difficult to consistently work on building resilience among individuals and communities because disasters, especially eye-opening ones like “Yolanda” was, come only occasionally. In between, there are equally important and seemingly more urgent issues: poverty, the economy, crime, drugs, violence. Despite this, however, the Duterte administration must not lose sight of this objective: to strengthen the capacity of communities to anticipate disasters, prevent loss and damage, address their immediate effects and then, in the long term, build back better and emerge stronger than they ever were to begin with. These efforts may not be front and center now, but when the next big disaster comes, all the hard work of the past few years can be wiped out, and we will have been set back again when it is already so difficult to trudge along.
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SLAYING MONSTERS LONG STORY SHORT ADELLE CHUA
SOME people get a kick out of horror movies. They are never more alive than when they watch heart-stopping, goosebump-inducing, scream-inviting flicks. They relish the roller coaster of emotions and the bragging rights at being brave enough to survive them.
Imagine the bragging rights.
I hated horror movies. Why create for yourself a stress so unnecessary? In the case of the cinema, why pay all that money just to get yourself scared? It all seemed pretty silly to me. This revulsion towards horror movies had some basis. When I was eight or
nine, my grandmother took me to watch Lovingly Yours, Helen (the movie) where the late teen actress Julie Vega played the role of a young woman possessed by an evil spirit. After watching the movie, I became feverish—even delirious. I distinctly Turn to B2
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